The streets are safer in Baghdad than in Caracas, Venezuela, where the soaring homicide toll is a blemish on the revolutionary government that promised reform. (NYT) View

A two-year investigative project uncovers huge, covert national security buildups in the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks, hidden from public scrutiny. (WP) View

A serious drug epidemic sweeps across Northern Virginia, where upper-middle-class adolescents are getting hooked, overdosing and dying. View

A comprehensive 25th-anniversary look back at a devastating day in Philadelphia's history, when police bombed a row house. (Philadelphia Inquirer) View

Homeowners like Vicki Valentine are getting evicted, not because of unpaid mortgages, but because of small debts owed to local tax collectors. (Huffington Post) View

Three years after Tom Urbanski was shot and paralyzed from the waist down, he's achieved a seemingly impossible goal: to play guitar again in a band. (Las Vegas Sun) View

Damon Conrow, 26, believes that the only way to rescue himself from a debilitating drug habit is to spend more time in state prison. (Standard-Examiner) View

Run almost entirely by ex-cons, a D.C. outreach organization works to help gang members and at-risk youth. View

Following the devastating earthquake, many Haitian women and girls now face a new kind of terror. (Time) View

California parents demand to know what environmental factors are causing the high number of birth defects in their community. (LAT) View

Twenty years after providing blood samples for diabetes research, the Havasupai tribe got them back -- after charges of medical fraud and a prolonged lawsuit. (NYT) View

A menagerie of exotic animals has found a haven at Villa Lorena, a refuge that rescues the castoff pets of the country's drug lords. (NYT) View